


Come Close, You're Feeling Distant

by multifandommonster



Category: The Nice Guys (2016)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Found Family, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, healy is the man to give it to him, holland march needs a hug, holly is the best character ever argue with a wall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-19 05:22:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29621244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/multifandommonster/pseuds/multifandommonster
Summary: Holland March exists in extremes.
Relationships: Jackson Healy/Holland March
Comments: 5
Kudos: 20





	Come Close, You're Feeling Distant

**Author's Note:**

> warning for brief description of the fire and minor character death

Holland knows he can’t explain the way he feels too big for his bones, boiling from the inside out in a horrified, sickly way.

His body runs hot, blood always simmering warm just below the surface. He was told once by an off-the-clock therapist in a bar off 34th that the lasting film of fever was from  _ panic _ , just a normal reaction to over-stimulation. He understands the rationale, but on his worst nights Holland finds himself thinking that the permanent heat is his penance for not burning like he should have-- it always should have been him. Never Emma, not for Holly’s sake. 

He’s never cold. Some might think that he’s lucky, but Holland feels like he’s constantly one breath away from annihilation, gasping for breath as his lungs fill with steam and vapor. Sometimes he thinks if he could scratch off all that blood-hot skin he’d finally feel the wind, maybe he’d finally step away from that ledge he’s been dancing on for so long.

***

Holland March exists in extremes.

He’s jittery constantly, smoking like a chimney and desperately trying to drop the drinking. He tries for Jackson in some ways, Holly in most-- yeah, Holly is his little angel. The saving grace that she is, Holland thinks he would have been dead long ago without her, and though she never deserved that burden he’s grateful for it nonetheless. In the first few months after the fire Holland was hardly a person, let alone a capable and functioning father. He’d lost a wife- his best friend, his longest friend, too- but Holly had lost her  _ mother _ , fresh grief hanging over her head while Holland tried to drown himself in drink. She learned to take care of them both with no one to help her figure out how to do it-- he’s never going to forgive himself for that one.

He likes to think that he’s improving, though. Jackson always says he’s getting better by the day and Holly’s gone a little softer around him, stops glancing at him warily when he walks through the door and sniffing the air with suspicion. He’s far from perfect, Holland March. But that doesn’t stop him from trying to be.

Holland has a nasty habit of biting his bottom lip. It started as a way to busy himself, stave off the awful alcohol withdrawal by replacing it with another fleeting pain. The twelve-step self-help book that Jackson tucked into Holland’s side of the nightstand (without fanfare, a gesture of trust laced with an expectation) says that the root of his issues is punishment: Holland is punishing himself somehow, attempting supposedly to find an equally destructive habit in his feeble attempts to get better on his own. That’s the chapter he thinks he’s inclined to disagree with; lip-biting isn’t hurting anyone and it gives him something to think about, that little burst of pain and iron-tough taste.

It’s developed more recently with his recovery into a nervous tic- a bored habit, truthfully- to fill time when he can’t get up and pace. When Jackson catches him chewing anxiously in their bed at night, he leans over and kisses him to make him stop. Holland thinks he may never really get used to it-- that otherworldly kind of tenderness that makes his stomach drop, erupt with viciously fluttering butterflies. Jackson has noticed this little intricacy in Holland and cares enough to give him an alternative, cares enough to intervene with his own solution and give Holland a way out from thinking so fucking hard.

_ You don’t deserve this kind of softness _ , Holland thinks.

“Focus on me, March,” Jackson will say.

*** 

Holland always tries to do as he’s told. 

***

Jackson is a gentler giant, something that Holland- in the aftermath of a  _ spiral fracture of the left radius _ \- didn’t really anticipate. He’s a bruiser to a frankly astonishing degree when it comes to their clients, yes: harsh and demanding with a ruthless focus driven entirely by his moral code, and he’s the quickest between the two of them to resort to his precious brasses. But Holland has seen him cradling Holly’s freshly broken pinky; he’s seen Jackson bent over the kitchen counter at an ungodly morning hour, studying Holly’s math textbook like he’s the one in class just so he knows how to help her on her homework that night. He knows there’s a deep-seated desire within Jackson-diner-guy-Healy to care for people in every way they need him and keep them safe-- paternal instincts stronger in him than they ever have been in Holland. 

Holland has watched the way Jackson looks at him after an ugly fight, like he’s biding his time until he can get his hands on every one of Holland’s wounds and fix them with his passion alone. The tentative touch against swollen black eyes and bloody split lips, dabbing with a warm washcloth to clean Holland’s skin with care entirely foreign to his body-- god, Holland doesn’t  _ do  _ gentle. He bites into his kisses and shoves with ferocious insecurity, a burning shame in him desperate to fizzle out, and every single time Jackson’s there with his hands- always his massive, world-weary hands- to still him and calm that wild thrum of anxiousness. 

Jackson litters Holland’s body with undeserved praise, trails kisses down his spine without ever missing a single misshapen scar, mapping out skin that he already knows intimately as if it's their first time again.

Holland has never felt beautiful. Broken, maybe, roguish and hateful charm, but never  _ lovely _ . Never  _ perfect _ .

The pursuit of perfection is fruitless-- Holland has forever known that he won’t achieve it. But Jackson makes him want to keep trying, makes him want to drain all the bottles under the sink and go to Holly’s parent-teacher conferences with a proper tie in his collar, makes him want to break ground on that godforsaken plot of land for a home for  _ them _ , plural. He wants to write their names in the wet concrete of fresh foundation, wants to give Holly her real room back and give Jackson a record player in a new master suite, one that’s entirely theirs. He’s slowly digging up a long-buried part of him to mesh together with the new parts, a softer one with purpled bruises instead of jagged, gaping wounds. Holland knows he won’t ever be his old self, but he’s maybe beginning to believe he doesn’t have to be.

  
Jackson makes Holland want to be better, makes him feel like he  _ is _ .

**Author's Note:**

> this could not have been finished without extensive cheerleading and encouragement from my angel of a girlfriend, laura. you're the healy to my march <3 
> 
> EDDIEVEN0M on twitter, come hang out!


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